Zero Knowledge

Where we talk about blockchain technology and development

About the show

Zero Knowledge is a podcast which goes deep into the tech that will power the emerging Web3 and the community researching and building this. The podcast is made for fellow developers and people looking to educate themselves on the inner workings of the space.

We are non-speculative and focus on the tech.

Zero Knowledge is hosted by Anna Rose and Fredrik Harryson, two people working in the blockchain industry. Our views do not come from nor represent our companies.

Episode List

September 11th, 2019
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57 mins 38 secs

In this episode, Anna chats with Friederike Ernst from Gnosis about their work on prediction markets, wallet security, exchanges, and the co-working space Full Node in Berlin - a hub for the blockchain community that Friederike spearheaded.

September 4th, 2019
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50 mins 13 secs

In this episode, we chat with the Marek Olszewski & Kobi Gurkan from Celo about their proof-of-stake protocol, their work on making a mobile-ready light client, how zero knowledge proofs can help to make a light client “lighter”, why this would be desirable and what potential such a construction could unlock.

August 28th, 2019
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55 mins 20 secs

In this episode, Anna catches up with Jorge Izquierdo from Aragon One to talk about the beginning of the Aragon project, the history of DAOs, as well as the challenges and potential in these new organisational entities.

August 21st, 2019
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59 mins 58 secs

In this episode, we sit down with Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin from Near Protocol to find out about their work. We discuss what brought them to develop Near Protocol, how they used their whiteboard sessions to learn from the best people in the space, the challenge of blockchain UX, and what has motivated them to become one of the fastest moving projects around.

August 14th, 2019
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57 mins 25 secs

In this week's episode, we chat with Nigel Smart, Professor of Cryptology at KU Leuven and the co-founder of Unbound Tech, about his background in cryptology, the history of MPC systems, MPC systems in the real world, and how MPC stacks up versus other related cryptography and privacy techniques.

August 7th, 2019
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57 mins 51 secs

In this week’s episode, we invite Raul Jordan from Prysmatic Labs back to the show. He shares an update about Prysmatic Labs and ETH2.0 development. We cover some of the latest innovations, some existing challenges, timelines, implementation challenges and more. He also shares some insights from his technical review of Facebook's proposed Libra protocol.

July 31st, 2019
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1 hr 1 min

In this week’s episode, we chat with Ben Fisch, Stanford PhD student working in Dan Boneh's applied cryptography group. In our conversation, we dig into accumulators, Merkle trees & vector commitments.
We also learn a bit about the RSA Accumulator Paper - entitled "Batching Techniques for Accumulators with Applications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains" - that he co-authored with Benedikt Bünz and touch on some of the ways these can be used.

July 24th, 2019
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58 mins 32 secs

In this week's episode, we chat with Will Harborne, co-founder of Ethfinex and previously at Bitfinex, about the path from traditional exchanges, to centralised crypto exchanges and more recently DEXs. We explore what the role of the DEXs really is and what we could imagine seeing in the future of the space.

July 17th, 2019
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51 mins 42 secs

In this week’s episode, we welcome Ariel Gabizon, previously an Electric Coin Company (Zcash) engineer and cryptographer working on zero knowledge constructions. Ariel has worked closely with many of the exciting projects and researchers pushing the boundaries on zero knowledge research. He is also the person who discovered the Zcash bug (along with Sean Bowe and Zooko). In this episode, we explore his journey into the space, what inspires him, and what exciting new paradigms he is exploring today!

July 10th, 2019
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46 mins 14 secs

In this episode, we sit down with Pratyush Mishra, CS PhD Student at UC Berkeley and one of the co-authors on the Zexe project, to discuss the Zexe protocol. We cover how this paper came to be, what it aims to solve, how it works, how it could be used and dive into some of the differences between Zexe and some other existing zero knowledge protocol proposals.

July 3rd, 2019
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43 mins 18 secs

In this episode, we chat with Amber Baldet, CEO and co-founder of Clovyr and board member of the Zcash Foundation, about her road to the blockchain space, the problems she aims to solve with her work on Clovyr, some updates about the Zcash community & foundation, the state of zero knowledge research and the potential and challenges around the implementation of zero knowledge systems in the real world.

June 26th, 2019
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1 hr 8 mins

In this episode, Anna chats with Robert Habermeier, one of the co-founders of Polkadot and an engineer at Parity, about his early experience with Rust and cryptography, as well as the work he did at Parity on Warp Sync and Lightclients, how this helped inspire some of the development of the Polkadot architecture and some of the exciting technical concepts that he has discovered along the way.

June 19th, 2019
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54 mins 29 secs

blockchain, confidentiality, privacy, tee

In this week's episode we chat with the guys behind the Graphene project, Chia-Che Tsai of Texas A&M University and Golem developer Lukasz Glen, about Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), and the way the Graphene project aims to make it easier for devs to interact with these hardware enclaves.

June 12th, 2019
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47 mins 34 secs

In this week’s episode, we meet with Dominic Tarr, a protocol designer and security auditor who works on Scuttlebutt - a decentralized secure gossip platform. We discuss P2P messaging and the challenges of sending messages within a P2P network in a truly decentralised manner.

June 5th, 2019
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1 hr 3 mins

In this week's episode, Anna sits down with Joe Lallouz and Aaron Henshaw from Bison Trails - a validator infrastructure company based in NYC. Recorded during the NYC blockchain week, we chatted about the latest PoS systems to launch, what it means to be a validator, how the incentive structures can impact the ecosystem development and potential futures for this uncharted validator landscape.

May 29th, 2019
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1 hr 50 secs

In this week's episode, we sit down with Liz Steininger and Chris Wood from Least Authority to discuss the state of privacy today, the case for private crypto subscription payments and their P4 proposal. P4, or Private Periodic Payment Protocol, uses the shielded account feature of Zcash to provide a fully decentralised method for recurring end-to-end private cryptocurrency payments.